


prayed the rain would come

by deluxemycroft



Series: land was left to me [2]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Captivity, Falling In Love, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kidnapping, Love Confessions, Love Potion/Spell, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Suicide Attempt, Time Loop, Time Magic, Time Shenanigans, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:48:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22040563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deluxemycroft/pseuds/deluxemycroft
Summary: Caught in a time spell, Steve Rogers falls softly and gently in love with Loki.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton, Loki/Steve Rogers
Series: land was left to me [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1586281
Comments: 2
Kudos: 74





	prayed the rain would come

**Author's Note:**

> happy new year!
> 
> i tried writing steve in the previous fic as not knowing about clint, and it never worked. of course he would have to know, right? so why wouldn't he do anything? i knew why, just needed to put it into words. i still think it's a pretty intense betrayal, but at least he has a reason, even if it's not the best one. hope this is what folks were looking for in a sequel!
> 
> i suppose you could consider this fic an exercise in creative writing, in that i condensed ~30 years into about six thousand words. that’s cool i guess 
> 
> no beta, just edited by me.
> 
> please read the warnings!

Steve’s hand hurts from where he punched Loki, but the feeling is fading quickly. He flexes his fingers as he glares at Loki, who is putting on a somewhat-believable mask of looking regretful, but under that is actual genuine hurt that Steve hit him. Steve isn’t entirely sure what Loki expected, but he intends on finding out.

“Explain it again,” Steve demands, crossing his arms over his chest. “No tricks, no lies, just _tell me_ what you did and why. I don’t care about the mechanics of the spell, I don’t care about the time dilation, I don’t care about any of that. Just tell me why.”

Loki scowls at him. “I came across a spell that shows an Aesir their potential mates. I was able to cast this spell and one of the results was you.” His mouth curls up in an ironic twist. “I attempted, over the years, to court you, but you seemed resistant, so I resorted to drastic measures.”

“You caught me up in a time spell that traps us together for a year,” Steve finishes, shaking his head. He looks around the empty, white room for a place to sit, and a moment later, a small square table and four chairs appear. He sits down and rubs his hands over his face. “You understand that trapping someone with you when they’ve shown no interest in you is messed up, right?”

Loki doesn’t say anything, but Steve can hear him shift his weight uncomfortably. 

“Alright,” Steve finally sighs out. “There’s no way out, right?”

“No,” Loki replies slowly. “Not unless you kill me.”

Steve considers it, but not sincerely and not for very long. “That’s not happening,” he finally says. Loki lets out a quick breath behind him. “Again, this is a messed up thing you did, but I’m not going to kill you for it. We’ll just live out the year and at the end of it, you’ll go back to Asgard and you’ll leave me alone, or I really will kill you. Sound like a plan?”

He looks back to see Loki nod, hair falling over his face.

Steve looks around the room, glances down at the table he’s sitting at, and thinks about wanting a treadmill. A moment later, one pops into existence. Steve wants to be wearing running clothes, and suddenly they appear on his body. He gets up, stretches, and goes for a jog, and ignores the way Loki sits at the table and watches him.

After Steve has got his mind on straight and ran 50 miles, he stops the treadmill and hops off, a bottle of water appearing on the table. Loki holds it out for him and Steve takes it, drinks half of it, and thinks about wanting his bedroom and bathroom. A smaller room appears, with walls and a door, and Steve goes in, locks the door behind him.

He takes a shower and looks at himself in the mirror for a few minutes. He wonders what it is about him that would make Loki think they’d be a good couple. He wonders more about the other people that Loki didn’t choose.

It’s not that Loki is unattractive. Objectively, he’s...fine to look at. Steve doesn’t have a problem with that. It’s everything else about the god that Steve isn’t...into, for lack of a better word. Steve has never considered or even thought of Loki in a sexual or romantic context. He’s always been Thor’s little brother who causes mischief and problems and isn’t really dangerous, but Steve kind of considers him a pest.

He shakes his head at himself and goes back into the bedroom and lays on the bed, stares up at the ceiling. He doesn’t really know what to do.

He’ll make a plan when he wakes up, he decides. He’s tired.

* * *

There isn’t a way out. There’s no room out of the white box they’re in. Steve can’t punch or fight his way out, and he’s certainly tried. Loki just sits at the table and watches him as Steve tries to get out of the room.

A couch appears and Steve collapses back into it, panting.

“We cannot leave for a year,” Loki offers up, sounding a bit pouty.

“Yeah, I got that,” Steve sighs out, wiping sweat off his face. “Just had to make sure.” He shakes his head. “You hungry? I’m hungry.”

Food appears on the table and Steve joins Loki. He’s going to have to get comfortable with the god if he’s going to be here for a year. He’d thought about staying locked up in his bedroom for the year, but Steve likes to face his problems head on. If he is somehow compatible with Loki, he wants to figure out why and how. It’s only a year, anyway. Steve has suffered through worse things for longer, and Loki isn’t _that_ terrible to be around. Sure, he’s a menace, but sometimes he’s funny and Steve has been genuinely amused at some of the tricks he’s played—usually on Thor—and, as Steve glances at the way he picks disdainfully through the meat and potatoes Steve wanted to eat, he’s not bad to look at either.

“There isn’t anyone else in this with us, right?” Steve questions. “I’ll put up with this for a year, but I won’t stand for you trapping someone else in this.”

Loki shakes his head. He won’t look at Steve other than furtive, shy glances. “No,” he assures Steve. “It is only us here.”

Later, after Steve asks for a book to read and gets a huge tome of Asgardian fairytales, they learn that the room can only create something that one of them knows. Steve doesn’t have any books completely memorized, although he does have a fairly good memory and he remembers snippets, but Loki apparently memorized his entire library.

“Why me?” Steve asks after they’ve both been quiet for awhile. “How long have you known?”

Time passes strangely in this room. There’s no clocks, no lights—the room is merely bright when they’re awake, and dark when they’re asleep—and there’s no sun. Absolutely nothing shows the passage of time other than hunger or thirst or tiredness. It makes Steve uncomfortable and unsettled.

Loki clearly doesn’t want to answer him. He gets up and moves around the room like he can outrun Steve and his questions. Steve brushes his fingers over a drawing of a Jotun in the book and waits. They have all the time in the world.

“You are very handsome,” Loki says finally, still not looking at him. “I admire your strength and your abilities in battle. I find your unwillingness to bend from your specific moral code both admirable and naive. I suppose I was raised to see a specific ideal of a man as attractive, and you are very close to that ideal.”

Steve considers that. “Who were the others?”

Loki clams up and shakes his head, won’t say anything no matter how much Steve presses. Steve thinks about what he knows about the way Loki grew up, thinks about other men he knows that are similar to him, and thinks he knows why Loki chose him over someone else. He doesn’t say anything, just turns back to the book.

Loki sits down on the couch and picks at the cloth with his nails. He doesn’t apologize, and Steve doesn’t expect him to. Steve goes back to the story he’s reading about a Jotun maiden who was tricked by an Aesir King into bearing young for him, and then the Jotun killed the child when she realized she carried a halfbreed son. The King had a seidrmadr bring the child back to life, and then killed the Jotun. The moral of the story is, apparently, to never trust Jotuns. Steve is horrified and slams the book shut.

He makes the decision to join Loki on the couch. He wants a TV or a radio but doesn’t have anything memorized that they could watch. Instead, a peculiar looking screen appears, huge and grey and when Steve looks at it, it flickers with light.

A moment later, and a vision appears on the screen. It is of Steve, standing at the edge of the balcony outside Tony’s penthouse. Behind him, there’s a party inside, and they can see Thor bragging and carrying on and everyone else is laughing around him. Clint is showing off for Bucky, who’s watching him with a small smile on his face. But Steve is alone.

Loki touches down behind him, walks over to lean back against the railing, tips his head back to look up at the stars above. Steve glances over him and sighs. “You let us win today,” Steve tells him, looking out over the city below. Loki shrugs.

“Perhaps,” Loki says. “I suppose you needed something to celebrate.”

“We’ve had a rough month,” Steve gives. Steve remembers this moment. They’d had a hard time taking down HYDRA bases and Bucky had been having constant nightmares. Steve was tired of all of it, and when Loki had come down and started animating vehicles and destroying meters and sending manhole covers through windows, it’d been a welcome distraction. They’d fought him for a few hours and then Loki had dramatically announced his defeat and vanished. “I’d say thanks if you were someone else.”

At the time, he had been looking away from Loki, but now as he watches the memory, Steve sees the way Loki’s face flickers and his mouth turns down.

“That was two years ago, give or take,” Steve says, and the memory pauses. He looks at himself, looks at the way he’s looking away from Loki and the way Loki is looking at him. “It’s been that long?”

“I suppose,” Loki finally mutters.

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“To what end?”

“Maybe to the end that doesn’t involve us being locked in a room together for a year with no way out.”

Loki physically turns away from him. Steve’s instinct is to reach out towards him, but he stops himself. Instead he looks back at the screen. “Show me other memories. You said you tried to tell me, right?”

“Why do you want to know this?” Loki blurts out, and then flinches like he didn’t mean to say it. “What could you gain from—”

“You kidnapped me, Loki,” Steve interjects forcefully. “You essentially locked me away in a prison because you have a crush on me and couldn’t deal with it. We’re going to talk about this until I understand why. This is no more of a breach of trust than what you’ve done to me. Understand?”

Loki grimaces and then pushes his hair off his face and gives Steve a look like Steve is going to bring down an axe on his neck, but nods. He flicks a finger and another memory starts up.

They spend the rest of the night, if it can even be called that, watching Loki’s memories. Loki doesn’t just have a crush on him, Loki is _obsessed_ with him. It’s disconcerting, almost, to realize the depths of Loki’s affection towards him. But Steve is good with dealing with new and strange developments, and he decides to just take this in stride. He doesn’t really have any other choice.

Steve goes to bed by himself once he’s tired, and lays awake for awhile. He thinks he has a few choices here: he can keep treating Loki like he’s a villain, like he has for as long as he can remember. Or he can try to be friends with him and pretend like Loki’s feelings aren’t a component of their relationship. Or, Steve thinks, he can give this a try. He has nothing to lose, after all. Loki’s estimation is that once the year is up, they’ll be back in real life just an hour or so after they left. No longer than a day.

He’s going to think about it, but Steve is pretty sure he already knows what he’s going to do.

* * *

Time passes strangely for them. It doesn’t move forward or backwards; Steve feels like time is a wave around them, as if they’re underwater and looking up at the timeline moving over them. There is no passage of time other than what their bodies tell them. Steve sleeps when he’s tired, eats when he’s hungry, drinks when he’s thirsty, jerks off when he’s horny, and has no routine or anything that binds him to the earth. It’s...it’s strange. He doesn’t know if he likes it or not.

Loki explains that the spell they’re in is caught in between moments of the day Loki came to earth to fight Thor about Odin not sending him on the diplomatic mission. Loki found a few moments where Steve was alone and strung them between them. Steve asks to see where Loki cast the spell, and Loki gives him a sly look and does him one better.

A door appears at the end of the room and then texture and color unroll over the room, and it transforms into a copy of Steve’s quarters in Avengers Tower. Loki opens the door with a flourish and gives Steve a small smile, and Steve smiles back and then walks out, Loki following.

It’s a perfect copy of the Tower, and there are copies of all the Avengers, including himself, endlessly repeating their actions from the day Loki attacked. Steve shudders at the thought. “They’re all copies?” he clarifies. Loki nods. “Good,” Steve sighs. “We don’t need anyone else caught in here with us.” He’ll suffer through this, even though it’s not much of a chore, but the thought of someone caught in a time loop, their day endlessly repeating...that’s worse than Hell. That’s the worst thing Steve can think of. 

They go down to the city and Loki’s simulacrum is impressive. Beyond impressive, really. Everyone looks real. They walk for awhile, abreast, and make it to Central Park, where Steve finally notices all the animals are not of Earth.

Loki explains to him about Asgardian animals, one of the birds even landing on his shoulder, looking at Steve with beady gold eyes. Steve is enthralled, honestly, and looks at Loki in a bit of a different light as they walk back to the Tower in the light of the setting sun. 

For dinner, Steve wants pizza, and he takes more delight than he should in watching Loki eat it. They sit together on the couch and Steve leans back against the arm of the chair, legs folded underneath him, and Loki picks at his food, pointedly ignoring Steve. Steve smiles to himself, slings an arm over the back of the couch and leans his head on his hand.

The strange thing with time is that there never seems to be enough of it. Steve has lived with that all his life. He’s always been running out of time. Now, he has more of it than he knows what to do with. He starts out by keeping track of the days as they pass but stops soon enough, not even a month into it. The only way to keep track of any sort of time is to watch the simulated sunrises and sunsets, but the days don’t loop on a 24 hour track—they seem to restart randomly, or at Loki’s whims—so that’s useless.

But there’s never been this much time before. Steve suddenly has an endless supply of it. Yes, it’s only a year, but a year barely means anything when there aren’t even days. They have time to get to know each other in a way that’s intimate and gentle and beyond anything Steve has ever experienced. He learns more about Loki than he knows about himself.

They talk. They talk a lot. They sit on the penthouse deck of the Tower and look up at the sky and the stars and they talk. Loki learns how to be cared for and Steve learns how to care. Loki will never be anyone other than who he is, but he learns, slowly and unsurely, to trust Steve. They talk about their shared falls, they talk about their shared fear of losing control, they talk about all of the things that make two such unlikely beings so similar, and all of the things that make them different.

When the first year comes to a close, Steve doesn’t ask if they’re going to leave. He already knows the answer. Instead, he leans over and kisses Loki.

Loki kisses softer than Steve would’ve thought. He kisses like he never thought he’d get the chance and he can’t take a second of it for granted. He kisses like Steve is water and he’s dying of thirst.

Everything that happens between them is gradual and soft and quiet. They have no pressure of time or any obligations. Everything grazes together in a soft haze. There is nothing for Steve to fight, no one for him to save—he spent a week or a month going all through the city, saving people getting hit by cars or getting robbed or being hurt, and it all resets when he wakes up again, so it’s the definition of pointless—and all he can do now is focus on Loki. He finds, after time, that he doesn’t even _want_ to focus on anything else.

Steve thinks that if this was what the spell was intended to give them, then he’s happy for it.

Before, sometimes it felt like all that tethered Steve to the earth was his routines and his job. Now, he has neither. All he has is Loki.

Loki is currently distracted by something, and Steve assumes it’s the spell. He doesn’t ask; Loki has learned that if he needs to talk about something, Steve is always willing to listen, but Loki has to seek him out. Steve can’t read his mind; Loki has to ask for help. It works the other way as well; if Steve has something he needs to talk about, he has to make the concerted effort to ask for help. It’s difficult for both of them but they’re getting better. They’ll never be great, but they’re getting better.

Time passes slowly and all at once. One morning, Steve wakes up and rolls over and comes face to face with himself. He reaches out, brushes his hair off his forehead, and his own eyes flutter open and look back at him. “I would’ve thought you’d want me to be in your body,” Steve says, his voice quiet and sly, and watches as his own face tints darker. Loki is such a lovely specimen; Steve is occasionally baffled he didn’t see it before.

“You are always welcome in my body,” Loki tells him with a smirk, just as sly, and Steve smiles, leans forward to kiss himself, and his own tongue slides into his mouth for a moment before Loki melts back into himself.

Steve pulls back a bit. “I don’t mind,” he begins, but Loki shakes his head.

“When you fuck me,” Loki says, and he brushes Steve’s hair off his forehead in just the same way, “I’ll be in my own skin.”

“You can be in whatever skin you want,” Steve tells him, and kisses him again.

After breakfast—Steve always eats a bagel, always a different kind, sometimes with butter, sometimes with cream cheese, sometimes with jam or some other kind of spread, and he switches between coffee and tea and water—Steve goes for a run. The room creates a few scenes for him so that he feels like he’s running through a forest or a field or a beach. He tried going for jogs through the city, but he couldn’t stand the sight of seeing the same people and same sights every day. So the room makes it for him.

Loki always watches him exercise. Steve likes it, likes putting on a show for him. He pushes himself a little farther, runs a little faster, punches a little harder, lifts a bit more weight. Steve has always been good at holding himself back, at restraint, and Loki teaches him how to indulge. While Steve works out, Loki does yoga, stretches, takes long, luxurious baths, drinks wine, and eats small, rich morsels that smell so good it makes Steve’s mouth water. Steve sometimes gets so distracted watching Loki stretch and climb in and out of the bath that he forgets what he’s doing.

They both know what’s going to happen. It just takes time. And they have so much of it.

They talk about their differing childhoods, how things that Loki takes for granted are unfathomable or beyond achievable for Steve, how Steve grew up with newspapers in his shoes and unsure if he was going to eat the next day and Loki grew up with tailors and cobblers and tutors and chefs and never had to think about anything other than being a prince. Loki is a fine warrior in his own right, which Steve knows from battling him and also watching his training routines, and they learn from each other. Steve doesn’t have his shield, but the room manages to come up with an acceptable copy, and they both train with it. Loki shows Steve Aesir styles of fighting, how he prefers a spear or a staff, but is well trained with knives and swords as well. Loki is more proficient with ranged weapons, and they practice in Barton’s range down in the lower levels of the Tower when they feel like it.

One day, Steve wakes up from a nap on the couch, stretches out and yawns. He rubs at his face and picks up a glass of water from the coffee table. “How long has it been?” he asks Loki, realizing he hasn’t asked recently. His guess is maybe two or three years.

“For us?” Loki replies, which is strange, but Steve assumes he means those outside the spell. Steve wonders if he should be missing them more. “Five years.”

Steve considers that. He looks over Loki over the back of the couch. It doesn’t feel like it’s been five years. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’s been a year, and sometimes it feels like it’s been a decade. However long, he has Loki, and he can’t imagine wanting anything else.

He asks Loki again who else he was shown by the spell. Loki refuses to answer, but Steve guesses anyway. When Loki turns away from him, he knows he guessed the right man. Steve apologizes and tells Loki he doesn’t blame him. If he was in Loki’s shoes, he’d choose Steve over his own brother any day. Loki rolls back over and Steve wipes away his shameful tears and tells him it’s not his fault. Loki’s shoulders shudder and they curl together under the covers, and then Steve pulls Loki into the shower, washes his hair for him, cleans his body, and tells him there’s nothing to be ashamed of. He isn’t sure if Loki believes him, but it’s a start.

That night, or maybe the next day, or maybe it’s just an hour later, even though time doesn’t have any meaning, Steve rolls over on top of Loki in bed and kisses him. They move together like they’ve been doing it their entire lives, and it feels like they have.

Steve kisses Loki afterwards, and Loki kisses him back. Steve tells himself there isn’t anything he wouldn’t do to keep this. There is no sacrifice, nothing more important than this.

Loki smiles at him and Steve knows he feels the same way.

* * *

At ten years, Loki tells him about Clint.

By ten years, Steve doesn’t know how to live without Loki. By ten years, the world has grown so soft and formless that Loki is all that matters, all he knows. Time is gentle and deep and passes them by and Steve does not notice it at all. They swim together in the deep dark and Steve is so protective over it all that at first, he barely even cares that Clint has been caught in a time loop for over a year.

Then he comes back to himself with a shock, looks across the table at Loki, wonders if Clint Barton is a sacrifice he’s willing to make.

“You told me there wasn’t anyone else in here with us,” Steve finally lands on.

Loki’s mouth twists. “I was unaware until he...attempted to take his own life. I believe he inadvertently became caught in the spell.” He motions to the screen and the memory of his past self, surrounded by magic and storm, brings down a spell, and at the same moment, Thor hits him with lightning. Steve is closest to Loki, but Clint is right behind him, and he’s caught up in it.

“He tried to kill himself?” Steve asks. “How?”

Loki motions to the screen again, and Steve watches as Clint stands at the railing, looking down, and then Clint climbs up, and falls down, down, down.

He looks away before Clint hits the ground.

“Alright,” he says, “how do we get him out of this?”

“I don’t believe I can,” Loki tells him. “I believe that to take Barton out of the spell, we will be taken out of it as well.” His mouth turns down. “The spell begins to disintegrate when Barton dies. I have had to reanimate him and place him back into it whenever he takes his own life.”

“What would happen if you didn’t bring him back?”

“The spell would crumble, and us along with it. If one of us dies, the others would die as well.”

Steve nods. “You told me the only way to end the spell would be to kill you.”

Loki shrugs. “You would have died as well, but it was not a particular concern as mine, as I did not believe you would’ve taken my life, and I would’ve been dead regardless. You were given ample opportunity to do so, and you never took it, even before I brought us into the spell.” He pauses, curls his mouth in a way that Steve knows he’s going to admit something sensitive. “I wondered once if my death would make you happy. I even placed myself in situations where it would be easy for you to kill me, and you never did. So I knew that when given the chance, even in the spell, you would not take it.”

After a decade, the sting of Loki kidnapping him and keeping him essentially prisoner in this spell has lessened. Steve barely remembers anymore that he technically can’t leave, that’s he’s technically a captive. It doesn’t feel like captivity. It feels like the most free he’s ever been in his life. Steve reaches out across the table and Loki takes his hand.

“We can’t make him suffer because we want to be together,” Steve finally says firmly, and Loki nods. “Can you just make him fall asleep or something? Until we’re…” He trails off, doesn’t know what to say.

Loki pulls his hand back. “Until we’re done? Until you’ve finished with me?”

“No,” Steve assures him. “That will never happen and you know it. But we have to go back one day, right?” Even as he says it, he knows he doesn’t want to. He never wants to leave their comfortable room and never wants to go back to living with time and other people and responsibilities and being Captain America. The weight of all of that is off his shoulders and he doesn’t remember how he used to bear it.

Loki looks at him for a long moment and Steve already knows he’s going to lie. “Of course we are going to return,” Loki says. Steve doesn’t ask his next question but Loki answers it anyway. “I’ve known for a few years, ever since he tried to kill himself the first time. I felt the spell start to change and disintegrate and realized something must’ve changed to cause that, and found him. I did not tell you because…” Loki trails off, looks away from him.

“You don’t want to leave,” Steve finishes for him. Loki doesn’t have to move or respond for Steve to know the truth. He sighs. “Alright,” he decides, “try to find a way for Clint to leave and we can stay.” He holds up a hand to stop Loki’s protestations that he’s already tried that. “I know you’ve already looked. Look again. If there’s anyone who can figure it out, it’s you.”

Loki’s mouth curls up in the way Steve wanted, and he smiles back.

“If it comes down to it, we have to save Clint,” Steve tells him. “He’s already tried to kill himself once. He’ll keep doing it if he stays here any longer and you know it.” Loki’s forehead wrinkles. “It’s only been once, right?”

“Perhaps five,” Loki lies. Steve doesn’t begrudge him for his lying, never has. It’s more natural to Loki than breathing. All he asks is that Loki doesn’t work to make Steve believe his lies; Loki can make anyone believe anything if he really works at it, and Steve just wants Loki to trust him enough not to catch him in a web.

Time suddenly feels very real. Steve can feel it passing like cold water dripping on the back of his neck. Loki says that Clint is in a different time than them, that he lives approximately a year in the time loop for every decade they live in their room, and Steve at least has that to hold onto. 

“Promise me you’ll work on it.”

Loki looks him dead in the eye and lies. “I promise.”

Steve loves him anyway.

The way Steve loves him feels like a vine slowly travelling up his body. It feels like it’s rooting him to the earth, like Loki is all that’s keeping him standing. His love feels bigger than him, as if it’s burst out of him and expanded to fill the entire room. He doesn’t know how to love any other way, isn’t sure he would want to.

There isn’t much Steve can do to help. Loki tells him that he can’t actually talk to Clint in fear of messing up the spell, and while Steve has read a few of Loki’s books on magic theory, there’s so much that he doesn’t understand that he doesn’t want to take the chance. He covets being with Loki so much that he refuses to risk any of it, even for Clint. 

He feels guilty, but he puts Clint out of his mind. It’s hard, but it grows easier with time.

And they have so much time.

Steve sometimes feels like he’s floating with it, like he’s barely tethered down. He’s not entirely sure he even _can_ go back. They’re living in between time, not wrapped up in it like every other human and being on the planet and elsewhere. Everyone else lives with time constantly pressing down on them, and Steve and Loki don’t have that. They have the freedom to live and love in a way that they’ve both previously thought unattainable.

After awhile, Steve justifies the sacrifice. He can live with Clint suffering if it means he gets to be with Loki. He doesn’t think that’s how it works, doesn’t think the person he was before all this would’ve been fine with it, but he’s not that man anymore. Whenever he thinks about it, all he has to do is look at Loki and anything and everything is justifiable again. 

A peculiar thing about time is that when there isn’t any of it and simultaneously too much of it, it becomes precious. It turns into a commodity. Steve hoards it, hoards the moments where he can almost feel it passing, the moments where he and Loki are curled up on the couch, where they’re in bed together, where they’re watching the sky or the stars, where they’re in the shower together, exploring each other when they know each other inside and out, where he reads the newspaper while Loki brings him a bagel every morning, or while he fucks Loki, slow and careful and possessive, Loki looking up at him like he still can’t imagine Steve is really there. Little moments become precious, more precious than the large ones, because there are so many large ones.

Sometimes, he watches Clint. Loki figured out how to make him invisible, so he can float around and watch the archer as he tries and fails to learn how to live in a time loop. Steve feels like deserves to watch Clint suffer, to make himself pay for what he’s making Clint live through.

He watches Clint fall in love with a copy of Steve’s best friend. Or as much in love as someone can be with a copy of a person. He had an inkling, before the spell, that Bucky and Clint had a thing for each other, but he wasn’t really sure anything would ever come of it.

He watches as Clint and Bucky curl on the couch together, as they hold hands, as they kiss, as they make love, as Clint tries to make a life in a world that never changes and with people who never remember. Steve watches and makes himself watch everything. He thinks that if he can see truly how Clint is living then he can see if it’s still justifiable for Steve to sacrifice his happiness for Steve’s own. 

Sometimes, it doesn’t feel like he can. Every time, he wakes up to Loki again, and everything else fades away. 

Somehow, somewhere along the line, their happiness means Clint is going to suffer. Somehow, somewhere along the way, Steve accepted that.

He has this precious space with Loki and he can’t do anything to wreck that.

They exist in a world where nothing happens other than them. Sometimes the world around Steve feels like a warm vat of syrup and it’s constantly keeping him close. He curls up with Loki on the couch and Loki rests on his chest and keeps Steve from floating away. Everything is a soft, warm haze, and Loki is the only clear thing in his life. It’s lovely to live with him, lovely to be in love with him.

Steve reaches out and tucks Loki’s long hair over his ear. Their physical appearances don’t change if they don’t want them to. Steve tried growing his hair out a few inches, tried growing a beard, and always ends up going back to shorn hair and shaved face. Loki barely has any body hair other than what’s on his head, and he’s been growing his hair out the past few years, and it reaches the middle of his back now. Steve learned how to braid so he can braid it for Loki.

They know each other well enough that they barely have to talk now. Steve can read Loki’s thoughts in the line of his mouth, the slant of his eyes, the way he stands or sits, how he holds his shoulders, what he’s doing with hands. Steve wonders what he’ll know about Loki in another ten or twenty years. He wonders if this is what it’s like to grow old with someone, even though neither of them are aging. He wonders what Loki will look like when he’s old, how he’ll wrinkle, if his hair will grey, if he’ll grow mean or cruel or if old age will make him kind. He hopes he’s around to see it.

If he wants to see the effects of time, they’re going to have to leave.

Steve doesn’t want to leave, so he doesn’t let himself think about it.

With the addition of knowing Clint is involved in the spell, it makes time feel different. It makes Steve feel a little weighed down, and it takes him awhile to realize it’s guilt. He hasn’t felt guilt in a decade. It’s strange, makes him feel dirty.

But for all the work he’s done on bettering himself, he’s still the master of pushing down his emotions, and he pushes the guilt away until it’s just a crease in his forehead at the end of the day. Or the beginning. It doesn’t matter, not really.

Loki joins him for breakfast one day. Steve sometimes eats breakfast before he goes to bed, sometimes in the middle of the day, but he always eats the same thing. He has the entire time they’ve been in the room. He reads the same newspaper they’ve had in the room for a decade while he eats breakfast. It’s maybe the only routine he has left. It’s comforting. 

“There’s a chance I can put Barton into his own spell,” Loki informs him, “where he believes he’s with Barnes.”

“And we can stay here?” Steve asks. Loki nods.

Steve considers it. Maybe it could work. “How stable is that? A spell within a spell?”

“Very,” Loki sighs out. “It would be very risky.”

“But we would be together,” Steve finishes for him. He sits back in his chair, scrubs his hands through his hair. He looks up at the ceiling. “Clint has suffered because we want to be together. I think we do what’s best for him. Whatever is going to make him happiest.”

They talk a lot more about what that means, about what Clint would want, about how to tell him, a hundred different plans for a hundred different decisions.

Of course, because he’s Clint Barton, he figures it out on his own and wrecks up everything they’ve come up with.

When Clint finds out, Steve is hungry. It’s one of the few ways he has to measure the passage of time; he gets hungry two or three times a day, and it’s one of the regular constants he has. When he hears Clint say his name, he knows it’s over. They’ve gotten twenty incredible, indescribable years together, and it’s over.

They put Clint to sleep and Loki puts him in a box in the corner of the room. He dissolves the rest of the Tower on Steve’s request to make sure there’s no one else locked in the spell. Then it’s just him and Loki in their room, and Steve can never quite forget that Clint is hidden away in one of the corners, waiting for them to save him.

Eventually, Loki comes up with three ideas. He tells them all to Steve, and Steve can see the benefits and disadvantages of each one. Ultimately, it’s Loki’s decision. Steve can influence him, can suade him to one side or the other, but Loki is the one with magic. He’s the only one of the two of them that can really make anything happen.

They can keep Clint locked up in the box for the rest of time, they can create him a new spell where it’s him and Bucky, or they can leave. There are no other options.

He trusts Loki to fix it, and when Loki finally tells him what he’s decided, Steve thinks on it for a day, or for as long as he goes between two sleeps, and then he agrees.

Steve and Loki stand together as the room dissolves back to white around them, as their life disintegrates back into nothingness. They hold each other’s hands. They married in a small ceremony the night before, and Steve’s eye keeps catching the ring on his finger and he smiles at it.

Steve hasn’t left their room in seven years, but he’s the one who takes the first step.

He walks to the only door and puts his hand on the handle, watches Clint and Bucky talk to each other, and then looks back at Loki.

Here, at the end of it all, Steve doesn’t want to leave. Loki has told him what’s going to happen, and they’re going to be together. That’s all that matters, in the end.

Steve smiles at him and Loki smiles back.

He goes in.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! please leave kudos and reviews
> 
> follow me:  
> tumblr: @deluxemycroft  
> twitter: @whenhedied


End file.
